Ilene has been a staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor since 1999. She has covered 25 countries across the Middle East, Asia and Africa, reporting from some of the world's most troublesome hotspots over the past decade: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since graduating in 1993 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Ilene has also written for publications including the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, and the New Republic, as well as British newspapers such as the Financial Times, the Guardian and the Observer. Her essays and book reviews have been published in magazines such as Moment, Habitus, The Jerusalem Report, Tikkun and Ha'aretz Books. She grew up in New York and has since been based in Tokyo, Istanbul and Jerusalem. She was the recipient of a United Nations Correspondents' Club Award in 1998 for her coverage of post-war Somalia. She has taught writing and journalism as a visiting fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and at the Pardes Institute.

Linda Gradstein

Linda was the NPR correspondent in Jerusalem for more than 20 years. She has won several awards for her coverage including the Overseas Press Club Award for her coverage of the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and was part of a team that won the Alfred I. DuPont award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism for coverage of the Gulf War. Linda is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she recently returned to teach journalism in 2009. Linda has also taught at the College of Charleston and spent a year as a Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University. She speaks both Hebrew and Arabic fluently.

Jonathan Ferziger

Jonathan has reported from the Middle East for most of the past two decades, covering the first Gulf War for United Press International from Saudi Arabia and Israel. He was UPI's Jerusalem bureau chief through 1995 when he won a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University. He was UPI’s Asian Regional Editor in Hong Kong before moving to Bloomberg News as Asian features editor. Jonathan returned to Israel to cover business and later became Bloomberg's political correspondent. He is a graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton and earned a masters degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Wafa Amr

Wafa is a former senior Reuters correspondent and has covered the Middle East extensively, including the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003. She specializes in Palestinian affairs and now freelances and trains journalists for Bir Zeit University. Wafa also works for ARIJ (Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism) as a supervisor and a a senior analyst for Middle East International, the specialised magazine on Middle East Affairs.Wafa lives in Ramallah and currently is completing a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Miriam Herschlag

Miriam is a multi-media specialist with broad experience in Web publishing, documentary filmmaking and reporting for television and radio. She covered the government, immigration and other topics for Israel Radio, later working as anchor for Israel Television's daily IBA News and the syndicated Jerusalem Online and freelanced for National Public Radio and Monitor Radio. During a two-year stint in Asia, she was founding editor of the Hong Kong Transition Report, a Web-based magazine charting business opportunities for investors before and after the British territory's 1997 handover to China.